


three quarters of a heart

by teacuptaako



Category: The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild
Genre: Character Study, Gen, Light Angst, Slice of Life
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-01-25
Updated: 2021-01-25
Packaged: 2021-03-16 03:26:15
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,750
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28824426
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/teacuptaako/pseuds/teacuptaako
Summary: There was something about Zelda, Link found himself often thinking, that brought parts of him out that were almost more than love. More than fealty.A study in knighthood, 100 years after disaster.
Relationships: Link & Zelda
Comments: 4
Kudos: 10
Collections: Secret Snipers Exchange 2020





	three quarters of a heart

**Author's Note:**

  * For [tenpointson](https://archiveofourown.org/users/tenpointson/gifts).



> happy s4s-versary, darling torr! from your request list, i have scavenged: loz (gen), purple prose, discovery, trust, hurt/no comfort (ish, it's light, ruminating, angst), and slice of life. thank you for being so lovely and fun to talk to over the last year <3 ^_^

Link had always felt that to love was to tire. That there was work, every day, that came along with it: to love Hyrule was to get up every day and work on its behalf, to put in time, to go to sleep late after sunset with hands calloused and legs shaking with exhaustion. And to go with this— receiving love meant receiving vitality. It was what let him continue to get up, to continue to laugh, to continue to find pockets of joy between the strain of his half of the commitment with the country.

The reason why Link had muscled himself off the slab in the Shrine of Resurrection and stumbled into the world again was because of a voice he’d heard, which he had known loved him, more than he loved himself or anything at all at the time. It wasn’t that he wanted to please this woman that loved him, but that he knew immediately upon hearing her that he himself was empty, of feeling and life and emotions and passions, and that he needed to fill himself up: and the voice had said, step into the sunshine, feel it on your skin, and—

And after that, Link gouged himself on feelings. Devotion swelled in him, ebbing and flowing like the Zora river, and he got lost and almost drowned in both of them, a blameless situation, an inevitable one, the currents of time and experience pulling Link in their wakes while he did his best to chase ahead of them. The sunshine, the warmth of it, the glitter of it off a sharp steel sword and the idea of it rippling in long golden hair.

And then to rewind to where we started, to go through it slowly and make as much sense of it as we can: Link followed the voice because it held something he didn’t have for himself. And then he kept following it because Zelda had him, and it was a relief to be had, and it meant that everything else she had was his too— the cause, the country, the greediness and ambition to take care of the entirety of Hyrule, the big parts and the small ones especially. That Hyrule had to swear to love him back. The strength of the contract she had made through that love.

That borrowed connection was strong enough to take deep root in him. He lived on loans until he started to make contracts of his own— new one, for his memory never did come back.

Although he heard tales of grand feasting in Hyrule Castle, although he had been promised that he could return to them, had seen photos of juicy cuts of meat, fresh fruits, elegant arrangements of jellies and cakes that tottered alarmingly on their porcelain settings, the meal that remained to link Link as the most significant was also the first one he ever remembered eating.

After stumbling down the cliffside to the King’s cook fire, on the first day, the first day of his life, Link had bitten into a burned baked apple. The texture wasn’t worth speaking about. The skin was ash in his mouth. Hot bubbling juice dribbled down his lips, burning his chin, sticking on the back of his hand and leaving residue long after he’d wiped it off.

But that had been a blessing too— it had been the first thing he’d learned instead of instinctually known. That you had to eat whatever you had on your plate. That you didn’t have to like it, but you had to get it down. That this was what love was like: that it took you out of dark caverns and into gleaming blonde sunshines, that it filled you up, that it didn’t taste very good at all.

His stomach is full, the day he goes after Zelda.

Hyrule Castle sits confidently in the middle of the earth, not a monolith but a collection of spires jutting arrogantly from the bedrock of legend. Although surrounded by guardians, just by remaining as it always was there is an implied moral victory— the victory of outliving something evil. The villagers talk about the place like it's an inevitable fact, telling tales of sneaking into the towers to filch treasures and collect adventures, the excited hush in their tones telling Link that they believe Hyrule Castle to hold an inexhaustible supply of both.

Calamity Ganon is as much a feature of that architecture as it is a looming menace on the horizon. Link finds himself orienting himself by the red glow Ganon casts over the moonlit grass and being surprised to find the castle underneath it. He uses it as a waypoint: every day he gets closer, the scenery around it changes, the view becomes clearer, and that red glow seems to cast longer and warier shadows.

He wonders, sometimes, what keeps Ganon going. What contract he has, what form of love. Link eventually ties it to the blood moon: a cyclical promise of rebirth and carnage, of destroying and pillage. Although he can cut down hundreds of monsters between moons while those monsters can only kill tens of people, the monsters come back and the people don’t. It’s hard to say if they’re the same animals or different beats entirely. They certainly don’t learn anything, they certainly don’t change, but nor do they tire.

Something must sustain them. Something that sustains The Calamity, something that spreads from him to them, perhaps something they’re leaching away from Hyrule Castle. All Link has are suspicions.

All the monsters seem to eat is red meat. They cook the legs of creatures Link himself has never been able to find, turning them and cooking them through to the point of almost-burning. He’ll filch their roasts, warming slowly and evenly over large bonfires, and eat slowly through them, wondering every time at the common staple of a nearby, unopened, crate of apples. Their apples are universally wormy, mushlike, faded in the dark of the crate— absolutely texture less. They're quite different things from those that grow to fullness on the nearby branches, quite different again from the roasted one he’d had all those moons ago.

Maybe that was part of it. Part of the Ganon problem. Not eating but preparing to eat. Not freshness but the idea of freshness. Letting something linger, for just a few moments too long, in the dark.

Link sometimes jerks awake in his bedroll to find the sky splitting itself apart on the edges of the sunrise, bleeding red, gashing wounds patched only partly by the clouds, and finds himself wondering, _surely we touched_. He thinks about Zelda’s hands: she wanted them to be calloused and rough, but they never took to it, too soft from leafing gently over pages of magic tomes and too light when plucking flower heads and Hyrule herbs. He’d had to teach her how to throw a punch three different times because she’d kept forgetting it, putting her thumb in the wrong place, failing to put in the conviction behind the throw.

It’s maybe a memory or maybe a dream. But the image lives with him, it presses insistently to the top of his brain, that of Zelda signing _this okay_? With those delicate light hands, and then— pressing them into his face, turning his head to the angle she wanted it at, her eyes bright and blue and nothing like the burning sky above him now.

Every time, his heart crashes like it’s just been through combat. Every time, the adrenaline has him feeling along the craggy ground for his sword, wishing he hadn’t taken it off to sleep, although he keeps doing it. He conceptualizes most of his life through fighting now. He conceptualizes it through winning, through loss.

_This okay?_

And he lives it in devotion, in desperation, in clamoring through the aftermath of a history he no longer remembers for a future that he still needs. Maybe that’s why Zelda made him her knight. She had known, even before he did, even before it would matter, even before the fates did, that he would set his teeth and keep driving forth, day after day, for the kingdom and for its Princess.

That was why the fighting. And at the heart of it, the core of it, the light touch of a hand of it: that was why the loss.

Link does love Zelda, but not desperately. He loves her with serene certainty. There is something reliable about her, a presence at his back, guiding him forward even as he rushes to meet her. The upside to forgetting her is being able to constantly relearn— to crest a hill and stop there a moment, a sensation of not-knowing but knowing, of listening to the whisper of the world as it brags about having delivered a part of him home.

He gets better at cooking as he gets better at listening to that whisper. Link trusts in the Goddess Hylia as she guides him to edible plants and glittering rocks that he can trade for spices and better clothing. He never gets memories from the past back but his body falls into familiar patterns. His muscle memory reasserts itself. Seeing a view for the first time will spark nostalgia, and every time he sees Silent Princess blooming in the wild, he can’t help but tuck them gently into his supplies. He doesn’t use them for anything. But it feels good to have one on him— one that’s fresh.

His devotion ebbs and flows. Mostly it's all consuming: the howling and ravenous need to keep walking to the castle and the woman swallowed within its great maw. But there are days when it's less. When the feeling of the bow in his hand does nothing but hurt his fingers, when the glow of the stars isn't bright enough to see by. When the food he bites into is spoiled rotten. And then again, there are moments like this. When Link follows his Princess down to the doors of Calamity Ganon, secure in the bright blue of his Champion's tunic and with the river to his back. Sitting below the tall brown oak of the forest at the edge of the glade— a moment, for himself, to eat a warm baked apple. When he's just leaped from a great height and been caught by the miracle of the wind.

In moments like that, he is not thinking about Ganon. He's not thinking at all.


End file.
